Binance is investigating a breach that analysts say could be the largest crypto theft on record. The exchange said $6.3 billion in digital assets were affected, the BBC reported. About half has been frozen, but the rest remains with the hackers. According to The Guardian, Binance gave no update on the remaining $3.3 billion.
An initial investigation suggests the attack began with a hacked laptop belonging to a Binance engineer, the company said. This gave the attacker access to one of its systems and allowed unauthorised withdrawals. Miguel Morel, CEO of blockchain intelligence firm Arkham, told Reuters the incident began around 2030 GMT on Thursday and appeared to be ongoing. As a precaution, Binance has suspended all deposits and withdrawals and paused trading on its Binance Alpha platform.
Binance said user funds are safe. Co-founder Yi He said the company would "cover all hacking losses". Founder Changpeng Zhao no longer runs the exchange. He posted on X that the incident "does look like a hack on Binance". He added that, as a shareholder, he expects all user funds to be fully covered. Binance also runs a reserve fund, held entirely in bitcoin, to protect users after security breaches.
Two analytics firms, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, have linked the attack to a North Korean hacking unit called TraderTraitor, the BBC reported. Chainalysis said it had "high confidence" in the link. Binance did not answer BBC questions about North Korea. It said it was working with law enforcement to identify the attackers. The attack dwarfs the $1.5 billion hack on the Bybit exchange in 2025.
Other crypto firms froze assets linked to the attack. Tether froze nearly $1.57 billion and Circle more than $800 million. Yi said Ripple froze about $200 million. World Liberty Financial, a crypto company linked to Trump's family, also froze funds. Yi put these at $27 million in stablecoins and about $2 million in World Liberty tokens. Binance.US and Coinbase said they were not affected.
Prices fell in early Asian trading on Friday. Reuters reported that bitcoin dropped about 2% to a six-week low of $77,646. The Guardian put the fall at more than 3%, to $76,368. Binance's BNB token lost more than 8% in 24 hours. Coinbase shares dropped 4.8% in extended US trading. Tim Sun of HashKey Group said the breach could push investors to rethink the safety of assets held on centralised exchanges.
According to The Guardian, Binance has 335 million registered users. Researchers at TRM Labs say attackers stole $2.9 billion in crypto last year across nearly 150 attacks.